Decisions To Leave Cuba Are Difficult

Roberto Fabricio, Foreign Editor - WORLD OBSERVER

The man's voice on the phone hit me through 34 years and thousands of miles. He was calling from Madrid.

Arty was a voice from my past, so I knew immediately that there would be nothing objective or detached about this conversation.

As a child and then an adolescent in Havana, my cousin Arty - two years older than me - was always accomplishing the things I wanted to do: high school, driving, foreign travel.

But when the great divide came in 1960, some members of my family decided to leave Cuba and its then incipient communism. Arty's father decided to stay, so we drifted apart. The decision was not political. It was spiritual.

Regardless of the reason for picking up and leaving the land of your birth, there is an inner force that holds you to it, tying you to that soil ... and one day you wake up and you realize that you may still love your land, but you can't stay there anymore. Having lived through both exile and divorce, I can't think of two more similarly painful experiences.

Two months ago, Arty - it will be clear soon enough why I can't give his last name - decided that he, too, needed to leave Cuba. Again, the decision was not political, but spiritual.

"I studied art history, became a playwright, then an actor," he said. "I was in the theater, then in television. ... I stayed outside of political activity and concentrated in my world of words and lights. ... In that world, I accomplished most of my goals and had a full life for many years.

"But then, even if leaving Cuba had always been a dreaded possibility, life became very hard years ago and I began to think about it more ... and more ... and more. Once that despair hits you, it seems like the island of Cuba becomes a ship adrift at sea and you just want to jump off."

Another cousin, a woman with whom I grew up and almost the sister I never had, also left Cuba recently. She stayed here for a few months, visiting with her father, whom she had not seen for 25 years.

Before she returned to Havana to her husband and teen-age daughter several months ago, she told me something I will never forget.

"My husband and I would like to leave Cuba," she said. "If we can't right away, certainly before the collapse of the government, because we all feel that while life has been miserable for years, it is going to be absolute hell right after the government falls. ... We believe that bloodshed and a virtual civil war are unavoidable.

"Our greatest fear is [daughter) Celina. Whatever happens to us, at least we have lived a life, but she is the greatest victim of all this."

Just last week, my family heard from my cousin. We began discussing her latest message from Havana, that she and her husband had gotten a passport and a ticket to Argentina for their daughter, 18.

My cousin writes: "We don't know anyone in Buenos Aires, and realize that the United States is not giving visas to Cubans in third countries, so we know that Celina may have to stay in Argentina indefintely. ... We realize the dangers of arriving alone in a big city for an 18-year-old girl, but her father and I believe that she will be better off living in the streets of Buenos Aires than staying in her home in Cuba. We want to save Celina - time is running out."

A few days before the onslaught of rafters started on Aug. 5, word went back to Havana, pleading with my cousin not to send her daughter to Argentina alone. We indicated that even if we could arrange to look after her there through friends, we felt it would be better for her to stay with her parents.

During the past month, the spectacle of desperate Cubans jumping from their island into the sea has made me realize that any day, I may get news from Celina in Buenos Aires, or maybe from the rafter camps in Guantanamo.

As for Arty, after drifting through the gray world of Madrid's blue-collar neighborhoods - unable to get a job, a legal status in Spain or a visa to the United States - he decided last week that he will return to Havana after all.

"I have decided that I was not meant to leave Cuba," he told me. "Obviously, I can't swim in these waters, so I'm going to have to go down with the sinking ship."